Jarly mainlined the internet. If he could have plugged it directly into his body he would have done. Nowadays that sort of thing is on the cusp of possibility, but in those days all we had to guide us was William Gibson and our own experience of wandering around cyberspace.

It was not like now. The world, in the words of the old calypso, was full of empty. It had no features, no well mapped topography. Darkness hid everything, but in the darkness a few lights glimmered. Imagine a night sky with no more than a handful of stars scattered across the whole of it.